Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

A quiet little spot where Rod Mollise shares his adventures and misadventures...

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Issue #550: Deep South Star Gaze 2017: You Can’t Win ‘em All…

You can’t expect every
star party to be great. Sometimes, often through no fault of the event itself or
its organizers, things just don’t quite pan out for you. So it was for me with the 2017
edition of one of amateur astronomy’s longest running events, the Deep South
Star Gaze.

I suppose part of the problem was that I just wasn’t as
excited about the year’s DSSG (née “Deep
South Regional Star Gaze”) as I used
to be. Which doesn’t have a thing to do with the DSSG. It has a lot to do with where I live now.

Out here in the suburbs, I have a zenith limiting magnitude
of about 5 on a good night, far, far better than I had downtown at old Chaos
Manor South. I can observe and even image profitably from the backyard. Sky
gonna be clear for two-three-four-five nights? I can leave my telescope set up
in my secure yard just like I do at a star party.

Even given the current nasty weather pattern, I can sometimes get
7 – 10 nice nights per month out here in Hickory Ridge, nights with no or
minimal Moon. So, there’s just not the level of anticipation there was when I
might, if I were very lucky, get one
clear night every month or two that coincided with a club dark site observing
session. Back then, a week or so at a star party was just heaven. How I longed
for those deep sky photons after being deprived of them for months.

Despite the weather forecasts, the field was filling up...

My current mindset also has to do with work—or the lack of
it. I am now what they call “semi-retired.” While I continue to teach one day (and
night) a week for the Physics Department at the University of South Alabama, and
am a Contributing Editor at Sky &
Telescope, it’s not like I’m snowed under. When I was still doing my
engineering gig, commuting at least a couple of hours a day (and working plenty of hours during that day), a star party wasn’t just an opportunity to observe; it was a much-needed
vacation.

At first, it was wonderful to be free of the rat race. I
remember Saturday afternoon at the Deep South Spring Scrimmage in 2013, the year I retired at age 59, thinking maybe
I’d better go ahead and pack some of the astro-junk in preparation for an early
departure Sunday a.m. “Wait a minute. I can leave as late as I want Sunday. I
don’t HAVE to go to work Monday!” That was great for the first couple of
years, but by 2015, a trip to an astronomy event began to have slightly less appeal than
it did in the years when I really needed
a break.

That’s where I stood as the October new Moon and DSSG 2017
approached. I wanted to be back on the Feliciana observing field, hanging out with old friends and doing some astronomy from a nice and (amazingly) dark site, sure, but
I wasn’t as crazy for it as I used to
be.

“The longest journey begins with a single…”
yadda-yadda-yadda. My first step was
loading the 4Runner, Miss Lucille Van Pelt, with the gear we’d need for four
full days at the Feliciana Retreat Center in the wilds of the Louisiana piney
woods.

In recent times, we’ve tended to do three full days, but we thought doing Wednesday through Sunday
morning instead of Thursday through Sunday morning might give us a better chance of
getting in at least one good night if the weather turned bad, as it can down
here in mid-October—DSSG would be early this year thanks to the New Moon date. As the month wore on and the star party approached, it looked like poor weather was exactly what might happen.

When the week of the event finally arrived, the prognostications on wunderground.com showed happy little Suns and
Moons for Tuesday and Wednesday, but after that it was partly cloudy days and nights, and, by Saturday, lightning studded thunderstorm
clouds. In fact, the weather forecast for Saturday night began to sound dire.

Our setup...

Anyhow, I’ve been to so many star parties over the last
twenty years that packing for one is second nature. I know where everything
should go in the truck, and, most importantly, what should go in. I make sure nothing gets left behind by relying
on checklists I’ve refined and revised over
the years. Nothing gets checked off till I physically place it in the 4Runner.

It was all pretty standard stuff, but with a couple of
changes: a new mount, a Losmandy, and a
new telescope, a 115mm APO. If you’re a faithful reader, you know I recently
sold two of my beloved Synta mounts, the Atlas and the CGEM. I still have my
AVX, but what would travel to the star party with me would be my new GM811G.

While I’d been able to try the Losmandy out in the backyard,
the cloudy early fall weather prevented me from giving it a good shakedown
cruise, and I was looking forward to finally doing that. Thanks to its design, the
GM811 and its tripod actually took up less room in the truck than the CGEM had,
despite the Losmandy’s substantially higher payload capacity.

New telescope? No,
I didn’t go out and buy yet another refractor. The star party would be more than just a pleasure trip for me this year. That APO, a loaner from Meade, would be the subject
of my next Sky & Telescope Test
Report. That was another reason Dorothy and I’d decided on a Wednesday rather
than Thursday departure. That would allow me more time to put the scope through
its paces.

Once Miss Van P. was loaded, I sat back and relaxed with a
little Tuesday night TV. There was really nothing more I needed to do to prepare for
Deep South. I hadn’t been asked to give a presentation this year, so I didn’t
have to spend time reviewing and agonizing over a PowerPoint.

The drive to the Feliciana Retreat Center
near Norwood, Louisiana was a relaxed and uneventful one when we finally got
going. There wasn’t much reason to start the three-and-a-half-hour drive too
early. With DSSG taking place with DST still in effect, we’d have
plenty of time to set up before sundown. We settled on 11:30 or so as our hit-the-road
time. That would allow me to pick up the new books from my Local Comic Shop
(Wednesday is New Comic Book day, of course), Port City Comics. and eat Chinese afterwards, as I
always do on Wednesdays.

I'd planned on sitting here while taking pictures...

After a little more than three hours on Interstates 10, 12, 55, and multiple Louisiana back-roads, we were rolling onto the Feliciana Retreat Center grounds. We headed for the field straight away to stake out a spot. The
weather had been good Tuesday night, and looked to be even better Wednesday, so
it wasn’t much of a surprise that there were already plenty of eager amateur
astronomers on the field. My usual place along the eastern side was taken, so I
picked one on the northeastern field edge. The view to the south was
compromised by a tree, but the light dome in that direction meant I wouldn’t
be giving up much.

Up went the tent canopy, the tripod, the mount, and the
telescope. It was hot work since we were back into another warm spell after
having a few almost fall-like days, but not too bad. By the time an hour had
elapsed, everything was ready to go for what looked to be an outstanding
evening. The skies were slightly
hazy, but only slightly, and were that deep cerulean that spells “good things.”

Setup done, Dorothy and I drove to the lodge to unpack
in our small motel-like room. I noted with approval that the FRC had done some
maintenance and remodeling, and that our room looked cleaner than the one we had the
previous year.

Thence back to the field for the door prize drawing. No, we
didn’t win a thing, but we’ve won (or at least Dorothy’s won) plenty over the
years.
Drawing done, I did the final preparations for the coming evening’s observing
run, and we returned to the Lodge for dinner.

When you’re at a star party with not much to do during the
day, food often assumes a more than normal importance. Especially when, as at
DSSG, there’s no nearby town with decent restaurant alternatives and other
diversions. One thing that had always been good, very good, at the FRC was the meals.
Oh, there was one year when the portions were a little skimpy, but the food
that was served was high in quality.
Not this year. The food was, to put it plainly, terrible.

Start with dinner. Tiny pieces of chicken that were as dry as the Sahara. The
next morning at breakfast, I finally identified the yellow disk that was plopped
onto my plate as eggs. The plastic-like thing did taste faintly of eggs,
anyway. One evening there was jambalaya that tasted like it came straight out of a can, and
was accompanied by a side of canned corn. Another “memorable” meal? Salisbury
steak that was apparently made the same way MacDonald’s makes chicken
nuggets: smash some powdered something
together in a mold. I expected better based on past experience, and knew the Feliciana Retreat Center could have done better if they’d wanted to. I survived largely thanks to the salad bar (which also wasn't what it used to be).

While the food was
reasonably priced, they weren’t exactly giving it away, and it was certainly not a good value. I am aware the FRC has had its share of financial problems and needs to economize, but this is not the way to do it. Anyway,

I would have gladly paid five dollars more a meal for good food, and I suspect other star partiers would have as well.

Getting dark, finally...

Dinner, such as it was, concluded, what was the plan for
Wednesday night? Astrophotography. I don’t generally like to jump into picture
taking on the first evening when I’m tired from the drive and set up, but the
weatherman was beginning to suggest that if I were to get any pictures,
I’d have to get them Wednesday night.

How was aligning the GM811? Polar alignment was exactly the
same as what I’d been doing with my Chinese mounts for the last six months or
so, polar alignment with the PC program Sharpcap using my guide scope and guide
camera. The difference was that the much more precise altitude and azimuth
adjusters on the Losmandy made it far easier to get a dead-on alignment.

Goto alignment was similarly easy. Using the mount’s Gemini
2 hand control, I centered three stars in the west, where I’d be doing most of
my imaging, and one star in the east. While you can build multi- star models on
both sides of the Meridian, my experimenting in the backyard had shown that
four stars total was more than enough for the mount to yield excellent pointing
accuracy.

OK. Fired up the laptop, connected to the mount over the
Ethernet cable, started my camera control program, Nebulosity, and guiding
program, PHD2, and was ready for picture-taking. What first? Well, how about
good, old M13?

I clicked on M13 in Stellarium and the mount headed to the
Great Globular, stopping with it centered in the frame of my DSLR, which was
displayed on the laptop thanks to Nebulosity. I focused using my Bahtinov mask
and Neb’s fine focus routine, and began a series of 300-second exposures.

Unfortunately, when the first one finished, I could tell I
had big problems. For some reason, the images were in black and white. The
program appeared to be debayering them, since they looked normal rather than
having the pixilated appearance of non-debayered shots, but they were in black
and white and nothing I tried changed that.

OK. I’d work on the computer in the morning (images were
normal with the DSLR itself, but I didn’t have a cable release/intervalometer,
so I couldn’t use it for long exposures without the laptop). For tonight, I’d just give the
refractor a visual workout and spend some time getting more comfortable with
the new mount.

How did the Meade 115mm APO do? To find out, look for my Test Report in
an upcoming issue of S&T. I will say it surprised me. After a while, I
forgot I was using a telescope with "only" 115mm of aperture and just enjoyed the
beauties of the deep sky it showed me.

As for the GM811, it never faltered. Gotos were dead on in the
west; in the east it placed objects in a widefield eyepiece despite me only
having aligned on one star on that side of the Meridian. I hung in till about
midnight—my usual turn-into-a-pumpkin hour in these latter days, I must admit—before
parking the mount and walking back to the Lodge to get some shuteye.

After eating what I could of breakfast the next morning, it
was time to troubleshoot the laptop/Nebulosity problem. Sitting in the dining
room after breakfast with the PC and camera, I made absolutely no progress. The
problem persisted. All the images were monochrome. I was pretty sure
uninstalling and reinstalling Nebulosity and the camera drivers would fix
things, but that wasn’t possible. The Internet was so slow at FRC this year
that my laptop would barely even connect to it.

Really liked my friend Dave's new mount...

So, no pictures Thursday, either. It didn’t look like the evening
would be imaging worthy anyway. Stepping outside the Lodge and looking up
revealed a sky blighted by high cirrus and even a few “mare’s tails.” If the
camera had been working properly, I’d no doubt have tried some shots Thursday
night, but it wasn’t, so it would be another visual evening.

In the afternoon, it was prize drawing time. Again, we
didn’t win a thing. Well, Dorothy would
have won a nice TeleVue eyepiece if she’d been on the field for the drawing,
but she wasn’t. The drawing’s time was different from what we thought it would
be—I was only present because I happened to be on the field fiddling with my
gear.

Unlike in past years, “must be
present to win” meant, “not just at the star party, but on the field.”
Unfortunately, we rarely knew when a drawing—or anything else—would take place.
No schedule was posted anywhere that I could find, so Dorothy and I were in the dark about “when and where” much of the time.

Other than that, it was a nice afternoon spent getting
reacquainted with many old friends. Maybe the best thing about this year’s
event was hanging with the people I see too seldom, including Charles Genovese,
Walter Serrat, Walt Cooney, Barry Simon, Dave Diaz, Ron Marcella, Greg
Thompson, Bryan Shirkey, and many more (I did note a couple of familiar faces
were missing, perhaps thanks to the worsening weather forecast).

Also onsite was Scott Roberts, who I’d last seen ten or
twelve years before when we’d both been guests at one of Herb York’s old Optics
Expo shindigs in Anacortes (Washington). As you probably know, after years at
Meade, Scott was chosen to helm the new Explore Scientific. Not only did Scott
do a presentation at Deep South this year, he donated many of his wonderful
eyepieces and an APO refractor as prizes.

Finally, it was sky watching time Thursday night. I unparked
the mount and was ready to go immediately, no alignment required. Conditions
were not horrible early on, just not good. Those cirrus clouds were making
their presence felt, and it was obvious the sky was slowly going south.

I had a lot of fun touring the early winter open clusters,
but by midnight even NGC 457, the bright E.T. Cluster, was fading away, and I
gave up. The dew had been incredibly heavy, and I was damp from head to foot and
uncomfortable after spending a night at the eyepiece out in the open instead of
sitting at the computer under a tent canopy as I’d intended.

Friday afternoon, the weather forecasts we were pulling up
on our smartphones (when we could do that given the state of the Center’s
Internet) indicated “severe” was not too strong a word for what would happen Saturday night. Dorothy and I decided we’d leave on Saturday
morning. Why sit and watch it rain in the FRC Lodge when we could do the same
thing at home in comfort?

I got a couple of good Losmandy tips from my friend, Tim...

To that end, I packed the tent canopy and most of the other
gear Friday afternoon. Even if it didn’t rain Friday night, the dew would again
be heavy, I was sure, and nothing is more miserable than packing wet gear. I
left the scope up just in case, but that was it.

Friday night, I wandered out to the field a couple of times,
mainly just to shoot the breeze with various and sundry fellow observers. There may have
been a few sucker holes over the course of the evening, but not many. I’d
covered my scope and mount at sundown, and left them that way. I whiled away
the night watching movies in
the lodge.

Saturday morning, we were up and on the road before
breakfast. We might have stayed until ten for the prize drawing if we’d known
it was going to be at ten, but we
didn’t, so we didn’t. The trip home was, like the trip out, uneventful. While I
was rather put out at the way things had unfolded this year, I could be
philosophical, having seen more than a few star parties go down
in flames for me over the years, “Well, that’s just the way the old cookie crumbles!”

In retrospect, we made a good decision. The weather Saturday
night was indeed severe. Apparently, the FRC actually lost power
briefly Sunday morning, something that’s never happened before despite some
fierce storms here and there over the years. Absolutely no viewing Saturday night, of course.

Will I be back for DSSG 2018 next year? I plan to be and
would like to be. I’ve missed a grand total of one Deep South since 1992, and
it’s unlikely I will quit now. And I feel in my gut that 2018 will be a better
year for moi. I hope that turns out to be the case, but who am I kidding, anyway? Long ago,
Barry Simon told me, “Look, you know we’ll all keep returning to Deep South
like swallows to Capistrano as long as we are able.” I hope to do just that.

Postscript:Reinstalling Nebulosity and the Canon driver once we got home did indeed fix my problem, whatever it was. Murphy banished and the weather finally looking up, I find myself eager to do astrophotography from my backyard. In fact, I'm sanguine enough about observing again that I'm kind of looking forward to next year's Spring Scrimmage. PLEASE, NO MORE OF THAT JAMBALAYA, though! 2018 Update:
Yes, this is a rather recent entry to be a "greatest hits" article. But there is a reason for that. The DSRSG has been on my mind a lot several weeks--I'll always think of the event as the Deep South REGIONAL Star Gaze, its name during its glory years, which ran from it's inception in the mid-80s all the way to 2005.

When I wrote this article, I was a bit letdown that 2017 had been one of the star party's poorer years. I just didn't have as good a time as I usually do. However, I would undoubtedly have enjoyed it more or at least tried to enjoy it more if I'd known 2017 was possibly the DSRSG's last bow, its swan song--at least for me.

The observing field for DSRSG 1995

What happened? It has been obvious for a couple of years that the Feliciana Retreat Center has been suffering serious financial difficulties. Unfortunately, it seems the owner of the facility, the Presbyterian Church, has made a wrong-headed decision as to how to keep the place afloat. During tough financial times, the easy and tempting answer is to cut expenses to the bone.

Which is what has been happening at FRC. The site's (competent) employees were let go and replaced with part-timers who appear to have gotten in way over their heads. The result? Same old story you've seen a hundred times. Save a little money by reducing costs, quality suffers badly, customers notice and desert you in droves, and the business doesn't just fail, it crashes.

If I thought things were bad in the fall, I didn't know what "bad" was. Despite, as in the above Postscript, me looking forward to the spring version of DSRSG, in the end I declined to participate, having at least a suspicion of how things might go. It appears those suspicions were justified--I've had a full report from Barry Simon, the DSRSG's long-time Director, and what he told me is hardly encouraging.

At this year's DSRSG Spring Scrimmage, the food went from bad to laughable, with breakfast one morning consisting of packets of instant oatmeal and pop-tarts left on a table by the kitchen crew (most of whom were not even on-site for breakfast). There was an intrusive streetlight/security light left burning despite the FRC staff having been told it had to be turned off for the star party. The field was a mess of ruts an RV made some weeks previously at another event when it tried to leave the muddy field and got stuck. Despite promises (by the FRC) to the contrary, there was no Internet at all, not even the usual poor Wi-Fi. And so on...

So what is the future of DSRSG? Barry is looking for a new site, but, as he told me, if a suitable one, one at least comparable to FRC, doesn't turn up, maybe it's time to accept this is the end. The event was remarkably stable all through the 1980s and 1990s when it was held at Percy Quin State Park in Mississippi. Following the growth of light pollution in the McComb, Mississippi area (and other factors) the DSRSG has been moved twice in this new century. Frankly, I'm not totally sure I am interested in starting over with yet another "new" DSRSG.

As I have said before, when autumn comes in, it might be a completely different story. Whether the event is held (if it is held) at a new site or at an improved Feliciana Retreat Center, I just might get Deep South Fever again. But you know what? I doubt that at this point, in July. For me, the star party was never quite what it once was after we left Percy Quin. Oh, there've been some fun years, but never quite as much fun (for me) as in the 1990s. Right now, I think I'll be happier just calling it quits and finding something else to do in the fall. I really don't want to spoil my wonderful memories of DSRSG with more "bad years."

However it turns out and whatever I decide, there is one thing I know for sure about DSRSG: What fun we had! For years and years! Maybe that is enough.